Page:Tragedies of Seneca (1907) Miller.djvu/21



To appreciate fully the nature and the extent of the influence of Seneca upon English tragedy in the days of Shakespeare and his immediate predecessors, we must bear in mind that the public theaters were not the only places at which plays were then produced. At the universities, at the inns of court (which may be roughly described as combinations of a law school and a very exclusive social club), and at the Court itself plays were an important feature of almost every festival. Even those of us who know these facts are very likely to fail to realize the full meaning of them. We are likely to regard the non-professional performances as having no more significance for the history of the drama than amateur performances at the present day by dramatic clubs and college societies. We are apt to forget that, in the spacious days of great Elizabeth, learning, especially classical learning, had a value, an importance, a dignity, which not even the most academic of us now feels it to have. Our generation, busied above all things with making a living or with accumulating wealth, regards the scholar as, with the poet and the artist, the most unpractical and useless of men at best, tolerated as an ornamental creature whom society can afford to keep if it does not have to pay him more than it pays a butler or a chauffeur. To the men of the Renaissance, scholarship and the scholar had a unique and inestimable value. Ordinary business, in their view, enabled man to provide a living; religion taught him how to save his soul; scholarship, the knowledge of the literature and life of the Greeks and the Romans, enabled him to distinguish his life as a man from that of a beast, to approach as nearly as possible to that ideal type toward which they strove, the uomo universale, the perfect gentleman, complete master of his body, of his mind, of his passions. To men of these views and this temper, literature—first, classical literature and then the vernacular literature produced under the stimulus of it—was of supreme importance, and the drama was perhaps the most important form of literature. The value of literature for those who were then trying to transform the world, to rebuild it and themselves nearer to the heart's desire, was of course best recognized by the finest spirits of the age, men like Erasmus, Thomas More, Walter Raleigh, Edmund Spenser, Philip Sidney. But it seems to have been felt, though in cruder ways, even by the vulgar. An amusing